EconTech

Anyone who has talked to me knows that I am not a fan of the MacBook Air. But these reviews from the WSJ, Newsweek, and USA Today are rather terrible. Not that any major news outlet has been able to cover technology (or science, or math, or politics, or..), but if this roundup of reviews [...]

..if mercury levels continue to increase, what kind of health effects will that have on the fish? I’m not particularly surprised at the below findings. It is relatively well known that mercury concentrations increase as you move up the food chain, and the tuna used in sushi is rather high up there in the food [...]

I haven’t played with it. And due to the fact that most of my computing is done on a 1.8″ HD, indexing services are out for me (take note those of you considering the non-SSD MacBook Air), so this is pretty much not possible for me. But if you can drag and drop folders into [...]

First, it is discovered that Apple is crippling its software to prevent discovery of how its programs work, the precise purpose of the tool in the first place. This is likely to prevent discovery of ways to circumvent DRM, whether it be audio or video related.
Then, even Microsoft has relented on the use of Vista [...]

Well, not really, or at least I don’t believe that is his intent. But there can be little doubt that his analyses often fly in the face of the views of my fellow tech geeks. Here he is taking the position (I think, it is rather implicit. It could just be commentary on the Time-Warner [...]

From what I’ve seen, the movie looks pretty terrible. Even after reading Tyler’s review, I have pretty much no interest in seeing it. But maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems:
I thought this was a remarkable cinematic event.  But you need to know that the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and [...]

I’ve become one (a Wire-addict) in recent weeks. I knew it was a good show, but my friends watched so much of it so fast, I couldn’t keep up, and once I was behind, I was lost. But I’ve finally gotten around to watching it, and wow. Anyway, here is Sudhir Venkatesh on the second [...]

I agree very deeply with Tyler’s remarks on the necessity of ethical training when doing policy economics. In fact, I wish that, just as there is a ‘Law and Economics’ school, that there would be a strong ‘Philosophy and Economics’ school. It is, of course, easy to get caught up in the epistemology of economics, [...]

Ken Fisher over at Ars has posted an article claiming that watermarking digital content will be a failure on the same level as DRM (though video is still DRM’d, so I wouldn’t quite call it completely failed yet). His predictions on DRM were a) well reasoned and b) generally pretty accurate, long in advance of [...]

As indicated here, Krugman does not seem to think prediction markets are as at aggregating information as their advocates do. Yet for the recession numbers, he turns to them. Just a note. Nothing more.
edit: forgot to include a link
Making predictions is hard …

 
… especially about the future, and sometimes about the recent past. Will we [...]

I would actually make a strong claim than is made here (that wrong decisions lead to the death of people who are supposed to be protected). That much is pretty obvious (see Katrina). Any policy is going to weigh costs and benefits, and in the realm of public health, the costs are often death. Pretty [...]

I have been occasionally accused (several times as of late) of not changing my mind. I started writing this post (as indicated by the question mark in the title) disagreeing with Gelman’s characterization of polarization as solely a property of a distribution, and not the variable. I had started to talk about outliers, extremes, etc. [...]

At least, that is one take on the paper. For people who like to keep up with the minutia (but important minutia!) of development economics, here is one on ITNs for malaria control:
Jeff Sachs vindicated

On insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), at least.  There has been an ongoing battle between Sachs and segments of the global public [...]

The linking of data in genomic and bibliomic (spelling?) studies and what it apparently allows (see article below) and what Hans Rosling is trying to do, in a slightly different way, for the social sciences could be possible with clinical data. Probably it cannot replace clinical experiments, but it can add to our ability to [...]

I agree co-pays are important. As are listed prices. But prices are much less useful without solid indicators of quality. I still have NO idea how to pick a good doctor, and I grew up in a medical family.

Singapore’s Health Care system

January 14, 2008 in International Health Care Systems
Bryan Caplan of EconLog has an interesting [...]